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Conservative men in dresses
Conservative men in conservative dresses
Atlantic Monthly
Amy Bloom
(Edited)
The world of cross-dressers is for the most part a world of traditional men,
traditional marriages, and truths turned inside out.
Heterosexual cross-dressers bother almost everyone. Gay people regard them
with disdain or affectionate incomprehension, something warmer than tolerance
but not much. Transsexuals regard them as men "settling" for
cross-dressing because they don't have the courage to act on their transsexual
longing, or else as closeted and so homophobic that they prefer wearing a dress
to facing their desire for another man. Other straight men tend to find them
funny or sad, and some find them enraging. The only people on whose kindness and
sympathy cross dressers can rely, are women: their wives and, even more
dependably, their hairdressers, their salespeople, their photographers and
makeup artists, their electrolysists, their therapists, and their friends.
Drag queens make sense to most of us. They represent congruence of sexual
orientation, appearance, and temperament-feminine gay men dressing as women for
a career, like RuPaul, or, less lucratively, for prostitution, or to express
their sense of theater and femininity. (Barney Frank as a drag queen makes no
more sense, intuitively, than Dick Cheney as one.) Actors whose most famous
performance is as a female-from Barry Humphries, with his brilliant and textured
Dame Edna, to Flip Wilson, with his one-note gag of Geraldine-don't puzzle us.
Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire and the boys in Some Like It Hot don't puzzle us;
they're just men doing what they have to do to survive, learning a nice lesson
about the travails of womanhood, and giving one on the benign uses of masculine
self-esteem. Even the cross-dressing women of history, women from many countries
and every century since the ancient Greeks-from Joan of Arc to Pope Joan to
America's jazz-playing Billy Tipton, to Disney's adorable Mulan-don't puzzle us,
they chose to live as men because they couldn't otherwise have the lives they
wanted.
Heterosexual cross-dressers-straight men who have not only a wish but a need
to wear women's clothes and accessories-manage to be marginal among heterosexual
men, marginal among other men who wear women's clothes, marginal in the
community of sexual minorities, and completely acceptable only to fetishists,
who take anyone who claims to belong. Gay men do not say, "Oh, you're a
straight man who likes to wear a dress? Welcome aboard" Straight men do not
say, "Well, except for the dress thing, you're just like me. Howdy,
partner" Even in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where cross-dressers hold
their annual fall Fantasia Fair, few of the residents, gay or straight, seem to
recognize these men as people with whom they have a lot in common.
Many heterosexual cross-dressers never come out of the closet, not even to
their wives. Others tell their wives after ten or twenty or thirty years of
marriage, sometimes because they've been caught wearing their wives' clothes,
sometimes because the clothes have been discovered. the revelation that a man
himself is the "other woman" is a staple of cross dresser histories.)
Heterosexual cross-dressers often spend their whole adult lives ordering size 20
cocktail dresses from catalogues and dressing in secret, with only the mirror
for company. But lots of these men, driven by loneliness, by unmet narcissistic
needs (all dressed up and nowhere to go), by risk-taking impulses (it's not hard
to grasp that a forty-five-year-old 240-pound former Marine strolling through
the Mall of America in full drag is consciously courting risk), want to
cross-dress outside their bedrooms. Engineers, accountants, truck drivers and
computer programmers, disproportionately represented among the retired military,
predominately Christian and conservative (far more moderate Republicans than
liberal Democrats), these men go to get-togethers in Kansas City, in Pittsburgh,
in Seattle, all over America. They make forays into malls in pairs, and they go
to tolerant gay bars in small groups. They browse in the Belladonna Plus Size
Shop of Beverly, Massachusetts, and they hang out at Cross/Cross Consultants, of
Houston, which offers special package rates for shopping, a makeover, and dinner
at a restaurant; To weekly or monthly meetings, of six or ten or twenty guys, in
Nashua, New Hampshire, and Trenton, New Jersey, in Springfield, Missouri, and
Water Mill, New York, and throughout the Bible Belt. Arizona has enough
cross-dressers to support chapters in both Phoenix and Tucson. A man who cross dresses
and needs to be seen can go to conferences like Fantasia Fair and Fall Harvest,
or take trips on any number of cruise lines that happily host groups of
cross-dressers and their spouses amid a thousand other guests sailing to
Catalina and other destinations.
Sometimes the wives wish to come, to support their husbands and to enjoy the
trip, or to hang out with other wives, like golf widows or wives in Al-Anon.
Some come because their husbands need them to. "I don't mind, but really,
if he could learn to do his makeup properly and fasten his own bra, I'd rather
stay home" one woman told me who later called to say that she had bought
her husband a video guide to makeup for men and a magnifying mirror, and said
she was resigning as his dresser. "He can ask one of the other guys to hook
his bra,' Happy wives are everyone's favorites, enthusiastic or grimly
accepting, at these functions they are simultaneously objects of much public
appreciation and utterly secondary to the men's business.
Reliable statistics about the number of heterosexual cross-dressers don't
seem
to exist In the fall of 2000 I spent several weeks trying to pin down that
number. I checked with Jane Ellen and Frances Fairfax, of Tri-Eess, the Society
for the Second Self, "an international support and social organization for
Heterosexual Cross dressers, their spouses, partners, children and friends"
"Maybe three or four million" Jane Ellen hazarded. "Maybe
somewhere between three and five percent of the adult [male] population. People
who claim it's more- I think that's just, you know, a minority wanting to be
bigger than it is. And people who say more like one or two percent-I think those
are the ones who are ashamed." When I asked Ray Blanchard (head of clinical
sexology services at Canada's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) for an
estimate, he agreed that three to five percent sounded about right. There are
really only two points of agreement between Blanchard and the Fairfaxes: that no
one knows how many heterosexual cross-dressers there are, and that all these men
in dresses who assert that they are straight, sometimes to the point of
annoyance, are straight.
Tri-Ess was founded in 1976, as a melding of several cross-dressing groups,
including the historic Hose and Heels Club, which began meeting in Califonia, in
1961, and which is to many cross-dressers what Stonewall is to gay men: the
beginning of the end of shame (although not, for the cross-dressers, the end of
fiercely preserved anonymity).
Jane Ellen is a man with a mission: to save cross dressers from their worst
selves and to preserve their marriages. A central tenet of TriEss is that
cross-dressing is a gift-that wearing women's clothes is both relaxing and
expressive of a feminine self that is nurturing and gentle-and that it can
enhance any marriage if the wife is wise enough to appreciate it and strong
enough to corral what can be, as Jane Ellen admits, a narcissistic,
self-indulgent habit. In the words of "Do You Know Someone Who Is a Cross dresser?"
Most [cross-dressers] are ordinary men who have discovered a feminine aspect
to their personalities, and desire to transcend the narrow stereotypes mandated
by conventional society. Happy in their masculinity, they have simply discovered
a feminine gender " gift" and decided to explore it ... There is
within each man a set of personality potentials that are part of his birthright,
but that society labels as "feminine" and says he should suppress. Cross dressers
have made contact with these potentials and found their _expression fulfilling.
Integrating these into their whole personalities, cross dressers are able to
smooth off some of the macho rough edges programmed by their upbringing. The
result is a healthier whole person.
Once a wife or partner realizes her mate isn't leaving her for another man or
for a new life as a woman, or taking risks that could destroy their financial
and family life, the two of them can seek a balanced solution ... Many of the
traits that attracted her in the first place-sensitivity, kindness, appreciation
of beauty, etc.-can now be seen as belonging to that "woman within"
Cross-dressing is an attempt to resolve an internal conflict, and it's not
about fabric. If we had clothing for men and women that was identical in every
way except men wore shirts with four buttons and women had shirts with five,
cross-dressers would want more than anything to have the shirt with five. We
don't know why". Our categories and descriptions are so narrow and
self-protective that we don't have words for the drive to cross dress, we don't
have any language to describe the mixture of attraction and envy that often
leads these men to have sex with women while thinking of themselves as male
lesbians.
What is a Cross dresser?
An individual, usually heterosexual, who desires and needs to dress in the
clothing of the opposite sex at different times throughout his or her life. This
compulsive behavior generally starts young and the individual struggles alone
for many years with this closeted need. Cross dressing is not a sickness, but
represents a person who enjoys expressing another aspect of his personality and
gains both emotional and physical pleasure from this transition. It is not a
hobby, but a necessity and Cross dressing is for life. Cross-dressing is a
compulsion, but we must not see it as a sickness. A good wife should tolerate it
because the man has no choice, but it isn't too hard to tolerate because it's a
gift. It is about fun and pleasure-and it's a necessity. The necessity of
cross-dressing is frightening to the men and to their wives, and their wish to
tame it, to characterize it as a preference and a gift, is understandable. I
come to see why so many women find themselves sympathetic to cross-dressers:
women are raised to be sympathetic, and protective toward the vulnerable, and
there is something sweet, unexpected, and powerful about being a woman and
sympathize with a man not because he demands it but because you genuinely feel
sorry for him, for his debilitating envy and his fear of discovery and his sense
of powerlessness to live as he wants. One evening Peggy Rudd, writer of “My
Husband Wears My Clothes" says, with a slightly pursed expression, "My
next book is on joy: the difference between the level of joy that cross-dressers
experience"-she holds her hand up over her head-"and the level of joy
that their wives experience" Her hand drops to her waist. The cross dressers
around us say nothing. They nod, sympathizing with the poor wives left behind
and trying not to show how much better a time they are having. I think of the
twinkle in Mel's eyes and the fact that nothing like a twinkle ever appears in
Peggy's. It must be psychologically exhausting for her to turn this pain into a
shared hobby, his compulsion into entertainment, his need into an occasion for
celebration, and I still prefer his company.
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